Still More Two-Part Episode Hits and Misses

I haven’t done one of these for a while, so let’s take another look at a grab bag of Comfort TV-era two-part episodes and separate the hits from the misses.

As I previously wrote, two-parters should be utilized only for major series milestones or when a writer comes up with an idea that is so good, it deserves a little extra breathing room to be fully explored.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Since we all have more time at home these days, it seems like an ideal opportunity to find some great shows that will help kill an evening – as well as some to avoid.

Good: That Girl: “It’s a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod World”

Ann meets the famed British fashion photographer Noel Prince, who brings her to Los Angeles as part of a pictorial on the mod, modern woman. Of course he falls for her, much to Donald’s jealous dismay:

Noel: “I once knew a soccer player named Hollinger.”

Donald: “I once knew a dog named Prince.”

The photo shoot scenes are just the sort Mike Myers sent up as Austin Powers, but

Gary Marshal is really good in this as Noel Prince.

It's a shame he had such a short career – his last IMDB credit was in 1971. And while the ‘60s vibe is fun, I was surprised the first time I saw the opening scene, which took place in an automat. I hadn’t seen one of those on TV outside of Agent Carter, which was set in the 1940s. I didn’t know they still had them in New York 20 years later.

Bad: Bewitched: “George Washington Zapped Here”

This was a lightly rewritten version of an earlier (and much better) Bewitched two-parter, in which Aunt Clara zaps up Benjamin Franklin. Here we get George Washington (convincingly played by Will Geer) instead of Franklin, and the drippy Esmerelda instead of Aunt Clara. It’s still sad to me that such a great series ended with a such a dreadful final season.

Good: Dynasty: “Royal Wedding”/ “The Aftermath”

Better known among fans as the Moldavian Massacre, the first half of this two-parter ended with a scene that apparently wiped out the show’s entire cast. 

Measured by ratings and water-cooler buzz, this was a cliffhanger to rival J.R. getting shot and Picard becoming Locutus. Of course, when the next season began we found that the terrorists who sprayed that hail of bullets were about as good at hitting their targets as the bad guys on The A-Team.

Bad: Dallas: “Return to Camelot”

Dallas opened its tenth season by explaining how Bobby Ewing could appear in Pam’s shower after being killed at the end of season eight. Say it with me: Bobby’s not dead – it was all a dream! 

“I thought they had written themselves into a corner,” Charlene Tilton told me when I interviewed her on the occasion of the series’ 25^th anniversary. “Everyone criticized the shower scene, but I never heard anyone come up with a better idea.” She’s got a point.

“Return to Camelot” felt entitled to the special status of a two-parter, but that was hard to maintain with its undercurrent of “nothing to see here, move along,” so no one would linger over such an audacious reboot.

Good: Harry O: “Forty Reasons to Kill”

In addition to featuring two actresses I’m always happy to watch in anything, Joanna Pettet and Hillary Thompson, this is one of those stories that definitely merits the added time.

You’ve seen variations on this plot before: Harry’s case takes him to a small rural town run by corrupt power brokers that have the local law enforcement under their thumb. Of course, hard-luck Harry is going to run afoul of those folks and will take a few beatings and spend some time in jail before he finds what he needs to bring them down.

Bad: Family: “Taking Chances”

I don’t know if there really are any bad episodes of Family. At least until Quinn Cummings shows up. But this show is on such a high pedestal with me that I’m disappointed when it indulges in a drama trope that’s right out of a soap opera. In “Taking Chances,” family patriarch Doug (James Broderick, excellent as always) is hit by a car and loses his sight. It might be restored with surgery, but the operation is risky and could also kill him.

The performances are always perfect, so I can’t not like this show. But the whole conceit of a tragic life-changing event that is conveniently erased in the last scene feels beneath the standards of this Emmy-winning series.

Good: The Bionic Woman: “Jaime’s Shield”

You know how a good whodunit is set up so that the last person you’d suspect is the guilty party? “Jaime’s Shield” got me with its reveal. And all the other business along the way is fun as well, with Jaime going to the police academy and hiding her special abilities from an obnoxious instructor – until that moment she decides to put him in his place. 

Bad: The Wild Wild West: “The Night of the Winged Terror”

This was a barely serviceable single show that got stretched into a mess. Hypnotism stories rarely work for me, except for that Dick Van Dyke Show episode in which Rob acts drunk every time a bell rings.

This one further suffers from the absence of Ross Martin as Artemus Gordon, who was sidelined with health issues for several shows in the series’ final season. Only the genuninely hypnotic close-ups of the divine Michele Carey made this tolerable. 

Good: The Secrets of Isis: “Now You See It…And Now You Don’t”

Every so often I have to throw a bouquet at my favorite Saturday morning series, so I hope you’ll indulge me.

These were the show’s final two episodes, and they were used in an attempt to launch a spinoff series called “The Super-Sleuths.” After teacher Rick Mason is arrested for stealing government secrets, four of his friends and students set out to prove his innocence: series regular Rennie Carol (Ronalda Douglas), Asian kung-fu expert C.J. (Evan Kim), street-smart Feather (Craig Wasson!) and an magician of Indian descent named (and billed as) Ranji. 

Throw in a guest spot from Captain Marvel (John Davey) and some wonderful scenes set in the dearly-missed Busch Gardens theme park, and you’ve got a great way to send off a beloved series.

Bad: The Facts of Life: “Out of Peekskill”

It’s hard to find anything to celebrate about a story that removes a beloved character from a series canvas, and replaces that character with one that never really clicked. Sure, this show had already passed its sell-by date at the start of its eighth season. But it was still sad to lose Charlotte Rae and the familial connection she had to the kids in her care. 

Cloris Leachman’s ditzy den mother didn’t get a great introduction, and it was the beginning of the end for Facts of Life.

Five Television Moments That Should Have Been Better

 

The fall TV season is fast approaching, and there are moments many of us are already looking forward to experiencing. Some will surpass expectations but most will fall short, which has always been the way with television. Here are five moments from the Comfort TV era that promised much but stumbled on delivery.

Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett Team-ups

If there were a Mount Rushmore for television comediennes, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett would be among those immortalized. But when Carol and Lucy joined forces, the magic wasn't there. 

They had plenty of chances – Burnett guest-starred more than once on both The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, and Ball returned the favor with several appearances on Carol’s brilliant variety series. But none of their collaborations merit inclusion in a retrospective on either of their remarkable careers.

Their first team-up, in the 1966 Lucy Show episode “Lucy Gets a Roommate,” is probably the best. Carol plays a meek librarian who Lucy tries to coax out of her shell (with predictable but occasionally amusing results). I can recall only one memorable Carol Burnett Show sketch with Lucy, who clearly missed the rehearsal time she needed to perfect the comedy moments that became legendary on her own shows. In one 1969 appearance she and Carol played stewardesses on a Miami-bound plane. "Is that a Cuban accent?" Lucy asks passenger Harvey Korman. "What makes you say that?" he asks. Replies Lucy, "If there's one thing I know, sir, it's a Cuban accent!" That line earned the biggest laugh of the episode.  

Rescue from Gilligan’s Island

This one should have been a no-brainer. Gilligan’s Island was a syndication staple after its three year run ended in 1967, and there was obvious unfinished business with the castaways still stuck in their bamboo paradise in the final episode.

Closure was finally achieved in the 1978 TV movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, which reunited the original cast except for Tina Louise. The timing was perfect; ten years of build-up was just right, and the cast still looked enough like their characters so their reunion would be nostalgic and uplifting, rather than desperate and sad.

The movie earned an amazing 52 share of the audience, so it was undoubtedly a success in every way except creatively. If anything, Rescue was even dumber and more juvenile than an average episode of the series. One sequence with Gilligan paddling around in the water with a shark seems to go on for hours. Worse, its popularity paved the way for The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, an even greater atrocity that featured the unforgettable image of Lovie Howell face-guarding Sweet Lou Dunbar. 

Diana Rigg in a Sitcom

I love Diana Rigg. She is in that very, very rare class of performers who can take an ordinary line of dialogue and make it compelling by sheer force of personal magnetism. Kate Jackson has it, as does Michael J. Fox and a select few others – maybe that will be a future blog topic.

Following her transcendent work in The Avengers (look it up, kids – this is the one without Iron Man) Rigg signed up to star in an American sitcom (for the paycheck, she later admitted), as a British divorcee who moves to New York to start a new life and a new career as a fashion coordinator at Butley’s Department Store.

Diana (1973) was not a terrible sitcom, but it was terribly conventional and, well, boring. Which is even more unexpected for a show with such a vivacious leading lady. It was canceled before the end of its first season.  

Police Squad!

The success of the Airplane! films established the joke-a-minute formula of writer/directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, and the deadpan brilliance of actor Leslie Nielsen. But it was an approach that didn’t translate to television. Police Squad! debuted on ABC in 1982, and was canceled after just four of its six episodes aired.

Fans still remember this as a great miscarriage of justice (TV Guide ranked it #7 on their 2013 list of TV shows that were canceled too soon). But I kinda get why it didn’t work. The scattershot approach that made the films so unique became formulaic on the series – several jokes were repeated in every episode, such as the episode title on screen being different than what the announcer read, the faux ‘freeze frame’ behind the closing credits, and the murder of a “special guest star” at the beginning of each show.

Also, TV standards and practices being what they were in the 1980s, the show did not have the same leeway with the subtly risqué content that contributed to the best moments in the Naked Gun movies, which were inspired by the series.  

Barbara Eden on Dallas

While the timing was right for Rescue From Gilligan’s Island, it was not so fortuitous for another classic TV couple.

By the time Jeannie blinked her way into Ewing Oil, Dallas was limping through its 14th and final season. Viewers had already endured Bobby’s shower resurrection, a trip to Russia for no apparent reason, and the escalating embarrassment of Sasha Mitchell’s attempts to act. No one cared anymore and that apparently included the writers, who introduced Eden as corporate raider LeeAnn De La Vega. She went after J.R.’s company because – wait for it – he had jilted her in college. Really? Two TV icons and that’s the best they could do?